Custom Fields

Visual Studio 2005 projects typically contain work items that allow teams to track work done or work to be done. Work items include entities such as bugs, requirements, risks, and issues that can be associated with development work. Since each development environment is unique, Team Foundation Server allows teams to customize work items to suit the needs of their development environment.

Customizing a work item is done by editing a series of XML files that define that work item type. Customizations can include changing the name of a work item, or adding, removing, or changing the fields associated with it. For example, an organization might change the name of the "bug" work item to "defect" to match their internal terminology, or they might add a "severity" field to the "bug" work item.

Customized work items may either be included in a customized processing template, in which case every project created with that template will have the customization, or they may be imported independently into a project using the work item import command line tool.